International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

When included in a system, an element loses all or part of its potential for autonomous activity. This is a very significant feature and, moreover, one whose consideration is of utmost importance for the study of human systems.

1. Differences between a free and a binded element

a) A free element interact directly with its environment and does not depend to do this from other elements, with whom its interactions are nil or very slight.

On the contrary, the binded element depends on quite specific and repetitive interactions with some, or many, other elements and these interactions make sense and are maintained only within the frame of a more complex and generally hierarchical entity.

b) In some very special cases we may observe how free elements become more or less binded ones, as for example in the transition from individual to social phase of Dictyostelium discoideum (see J.T. BONNER, 1955, p.104ff, and more recently A.T. WINFREE, 1980, p.337 -44).

We ourselves, as participants of ever wider sociosystems, possibly are engaged in a similar transition.

→ "Meta-system transition".

2. Progressive binding

Transition from free to binded is for elements, a progressive one. However, two different situations should be considered.

a) in the case of a new type of systems in the making (presocial situation, most specially in human systems), the element progressively replaces direct interactions with its environment by indirect ones, through new interactive elements and, in some cases, very complex chains of these interactions: We now buy bread from the baker, and have no more need to till the field, to sow, to reap, etc, etc. In this way, privileged and interconnected interaction zones in space and time are created and a common boundary or interface appears, made of elements specialized in specific interactions with the environment.

b) in the case of a new system, already endowed with organizational closure, for instance a newborn baby, there is a phase of morphogenesis, during which the elements become selectively interconnected within more or less precise limits (St. KAUFFMAN's frozen cores).

3. Levels of complexity in binding

In accordance with SIMON's concept of hierarchical complexity, elements generally bind at their own level of complexity: atoms with atoms, molecules with molecules, ants with ants and men with men.

Moreover higher levels of complexity can appear only when lower level building blocks of the suitable classes exist in sufficient numbers.

At each superior level of complexity, new potentialities appear: the more complex system becomes able to develop more intricate activities.

4. Do the element "understand" the system in which it takes part?

This question mark is of course anthropocentric. Moreover quotes are used because we do not know what could correspond to "understanding" at the molecular level, nor even among bees or ants.

In any case, it seems unprobable that the part could be totally aware of the whole and of the significance of the whole's activity in time, still less than in space.

This problem is, indeed, a portentous one for mankind.